[Martin.]

Hi, i'm new here and i'm looking into getting a miniDV camera.

My budget is £250 and I preferbly would like a new one, I have seen quite a few in my price range in argos and comet etc. What do you guys feel will be my best bet? My main criteria is getting the best quality for my budget and I also need to be able to transfer the footage over to my computer.

Regarding transfering footage, I have heard I will need a firewire card, but I have a Dell Latitude laptop (meaning I don't have any free PCI sockets.) What are my options here?

Are these one worth looking at?

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/616_244562.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...054272-3071029

Thanks in advance.

[MarkE19]

Originally Posted by Martin.

Regarding transfering footage, I have heard I will need a firewire card, but I have a Dell Latitude laptop (meaning I don't have any free PCI sockets.) What are my options here?

Well if the laptop definately does not have a firewire port installed already (most modern laptops do now) then you can get something such as This to add firewire, but it is more expensive than adding it to a desktop PC. Have a search around though as I'm sure I've seen other makes cheaper than this!

To confirm that you don't have firewire on your laptop, go into 'Device Manager' and look for ieee1394. If you do see that listed anywhere then that is the firewire port.
I am assuming that the laptop is running at least Windows 98se, as any versions of Windows prior to SE will not work with firewire (or even USB).

You should also be aware that video editing will eat up the space on the disc drive very quickly. Most laptops only have a fairly small HDD, so the chances are that you will need to get an external firewire HDD to give enough space to capture & edit your video. 4 minutes of video will eat 1Gb of HDD space, that's a massive 14Gb per hour of video

Good luck,
Mark.

[Martin.]

Thanks for the help

I only have a 12gb HDD but I only intend on editing 2-3 minute clips anyways. Im looking into a new computer or external HD in the near future anyways.

For your 250 quid you'll be limited to a few jvc's and panasonics. The catalogue im looking at has sony's and canons aswell but they're slightly more expensive. I would have no problem recommending either make, it just depends on what specs you want.

[emocean]

One very important item to check when buying a budget camera is that it has both DV in and DV out. You need the DV in to recapture your edited footage to the camera. Also be very careful with older laptops when adding a PCMCIA firewire card as you may find that although it manages to capture your footage to the hard drive, it may struggle to output it back to the camera at a high enough speed for the transfer to work without break up.
I went down the same route that you propose and wasted a load of time and money before eventually buying a new laptop with all the required features!

[Martin.]

Hah, oki doakie, i've been searching round on ebay for some more cameras and found some Sony's pretty cheap.

Also, why would I need to transfer footage from my PC to my camera? Is this so it could be played back though a TV?

[melliott1963]

The main reason, as far as I'm concerned, why you'd want to copy back to the camera is so that you can create a perfect backup copy of your edited footage. Then, if for any reason you need to re publish your footage, all you have to do is re-capture the edited footage and then convert to DVD or whatever format you want, without having to go through the whole editing process again.

[MarkE19]

As melliott1963 has said, being able to copy the edited footage back onto a new DV tape is the best (& cheapest) way to make a tape backup of the edits.
DVD discs are not a safe, long term archiving format. It is not as common now as it used to be, but the discs can start to rot. The recording layer of a DVD is organic and therefore if the air gets to it it will start to rot and very quickly make the disc unplayable. Or as many forum members with children can testify, the discs can get easily damaged and become unplayable.

For the above reasons I always keep the origional DV tape recording along with an edited copy also on DV tape. Therefore I have everything I need to create a new DVD if required. But to do this you need DV-in on the camcorder.

Mark.